Cardinal Ersilio Tonini, Italy's most media-friendly prelate, might have been expected to take heart from the fall of an administration that was about to give legal rights to unmarried couples, including gay ones. But no.

"I feel for this country of ours," said the cardinal, "because it cannot seem to find a calm, clear way ahead."

None of the ways ahead being canvassed yesterday seemed to offer Italy the prospect of decisive change at a time when it desperately needs it. A reshaped Prodi cabinet would mean continued instability; a non-aligned government further inactivity; and elections - perhaps the least bad option - renewed uncertainty.

To understand why this is serious you can turn to dry economic statistics. They will show you, for example, that Italy is slowly, inexorably slipping behind its neighbours. Its economy has been underperforming the EU since the mid-1990s. It has become less competitive than Tunisia. And, in two to four years, Italians are expected to be overtaken by the Spanish in terms of GDP per head.

If you do not attach much importance to economic growth, you can consult almost any other measure of progress, from the use of alternative energy to the rate of female employment. Italy will almost certainly be found near the bottom of a table of comparable nations. According to Transparency International, only Greece registers a higher level of perceived corruption among the states of the "old" 15-member EU.

If statistics are not to your taste, you could do worse than go tomorrow to any dry cleaner's in Rome. It will be closed. Because it's Saturday. There is a rule or tradition - no one seems sure which - that, on the one day of the week that working people can drop off or pick up their clothes, all the places they can get them cleaned must shut.

It is a system designed for another age, in which women ceased working when they married and became housewives who could stop by the dry cleaner's any time between 9am on Monday and 7pm on Friday (except at lunchtime, of course, when all but a handful of the shops shut for two hours on the assumption that all those housewives will be serving lunch to their breadwinning husbands).

Turning away from the dry cleaner's you might cast a glance at the offices of the notary public next door. Very likely you will find the name on the brass plate is the same as 20, and very probably 70, years ago. That is because professional practices can be passed on from parent to child, as licences for many other activities can be, including taxi driving. It's why you never meet an immigrant cabbie or an Asian chemist.

It is not so much that Italy needs rightwing or leftwing solutions, just modernisation. Until the 1990s, the Christian Democrats, wedded to traditional family values, dominated politics, while the economy rested on a web of dynamic family businesses. Small and medium-sized businesses delivered economic growth and although governments came and went with disconcerting frequency, the Christian Democrats' presence in all of them guaranteed an odd sort of stability. Italian society may have been corrupt, cronyistic and anti-meritocratic, but since everyone was getting richer nobody really cared.

The Christian Democrat party began to crumble 15 years ago, but the society it created has proved astonishingly resistant to change in a world in which globalisation, knowledge-based industries and new attitudes to everything from sexuality to employment have arrived.

Romano Prodi and his team had embarked, tentatively, on tackling some aspects of Italy's sclerosis. They had introduced two sets of liberalising measures. Among other things, the latest allowed hairdressers to open salons wherever they liked and encouraged long-distance coach services to compete.

Several other bills were waiting their chance in parliament. One would have freed the state to dismiss civil servants caught taking bribes. It was a modest enough reform programme. But now it will have to wait. Or just be forgotten.